Perseid Meteor and the Andromeda Galaxy

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Move mouse cursor off the image to see the positive image.

The 2002 Persied meteor shower lived up to its fame with long bright meteor
trails. Ever since my last time photographing it in 1997, I've been hoping to
capture a bright meteor sweeping past M31, the Andromeda galaxy. The problem with
photographing meteor showers is that you never know where a meteor is going to
be to point the camera. So I just took photographs of different locations in the
sky with different focal length lenses. I was more than pleased when I got my film
back and saw this wonderful scene. The field visible in this image is 14-1/2
degrees wide by 9-2/3 degrees high. The extent of the galaxy is easier to see in
the negative of this image. Put the mouse cursor over the image to see this.

I took this photograph with my Olympus OM-3 camera and Zuiko (Olympus) 135mm
f/2.8 lens attached to my Losmandy G-11 equatorial mount in the desert northeast of
Phoenix, Arizona on the morning of 13 August 2002. The exposure was 10 minutes at f/2.8
with Kodak Elite Chrome 400 35mm slide film push processed for ISO 800. I scanned
the image with my Nikon Coolscan LS-2000 and used Adobe Photoshop for further processing.
Photograph by Rick Scott